Dial-O-Map 25°       communiqué

For the past ten years or so, the French artist Pascal Broccolichi has been working with sound to create works. These vary a great deal in size, meaning that they may fill quite small indoor areas (a few square metres in a museum, gallery, or art centre), or they may be installed outside in public places (gardens for example), or alternatively they may be shown in huge enclosed spaces accommodating them. Pascal Broccolichi does not create just sound or acoustic works. He may also take photos. But sound remains the main element with which he works--in precise instances we can even talk in terms of material and use the expression "sound material" to describe the way he envisages sound. The point of departure of his work consists of sound captures : with well developed tools (seismic sensors, probes, parabolic microphones) he registers sound waves and vibrations all around us, but which we do not necessarily pick up. To do this kind of collecting, the artist goes to specific and very varied places. For example, he may set himself up under bridges, or travel across sandy deserts (in Africa) or icy wastes (in Iceland), all so many acoustic worlds which propose sound broadcasts which are very different from one another, as are the many kinds of acoustic vibrations. With the sound-capturing tools he uses, the contexts that we think of as the quietest are revealed in all their acoustic complexity and this applies even in the very heart of the desert where, essentially, silence does not exist. This observation permeates all Pascal Broccolichi's work, which is a vast exploration - one intended to be absolute and encyclopaedic, even if the artist knows that this is all wishful, not to say utopian, thinking - of waves that are imperceptible to the human ear on its own and unaided, and which are nevertheless part and parcel of our environment, and our vital "surroundings". Wherever we may be, we are always surrounded by acoustic and vibratory phenomena. The artist's work consists in following and grasping such phenomena, and then creating works out of them.

So for the project at the capcMusée, Pascal Broccolichi made regular visits to the premises over a two-year period. By walking around in the building, he recorded the residual noises and emissions with his usual tools. What was revealed to him in so doing was the life of the place, in all its architectural density and layers. It is the vibrations of the structures, its acoustic resonances, and its creaking and squeaking that have become palpable, and enabled him to work out a sort of sound map of the place. Based on this harvest of sounds, he has used his computer to construct the sound section of the work which is audible throughout the exhibition period. So that the sounds can be broadcast throughout the volume of the nave, the main venue for this work, he has devised a monumental construction installed on the floor. It involves an enormous pavilion which prevents viewers and visitors from gaining access to the heart of the former warehouse, a pavilion within which various structures (reflectors, sound boxes broadcasting low bass notes) contribute to the diffusion of sound throughout the space. The form which encircles the heart of the device--this oval structure is called the louvre--is inspired from the panels arranged around runways at airports. Their function is to direct the sound downwards towards the ground. In the warehouse, the louvre is made up of a steel structure with an overall weight not far short of 40 tons. A white PVC surface has been stretched over this very shaped construction, a kind of sail on which the sounds invented by the artist reverberate, just like the very white light coming from the upper windows by way of spots. From the mezzanine, the work reveals its vast structure in its entirety. Everything here is designed to permit sound to circulate from the ground into the whole of the architecture of the nave, in all its breadth and height. By means of rebounds and echoes, this sound lodges everywhere that is accessible to the waves. So there is a marked contrast between the monumentality of the visible construction and the fluidity of the audible sound work. What is more, the interaction between the broadcast sound and the architecture as it exists produces acoustic variations and sound effects whose identity can be foreseen by neither the artist nor the visitors. It is the place itself, the nave, which invents its own sound and its own acoustic reverberation, based on the types of sound--the sonorities--proposed for it by the work.

Lastly, this work by Pascal Broccolichi starts out from the warehouse itself, from its acoustic form (these are sounds and vibrations collected by the artist over two years), and then comes back into this space in the form of a monumental construction which diffuses an acoustic creation. And this latter only finds its definitive form because the architecture accommodates it and at the same time transforms it. Dial-0-Map 25º, the title chosen by the artist for his work, is thus nothing less than an installation: it can only exist in relation to the place in which it takes place. It corresponds to it totally. In this sense, this sound piece asserts a truly contemporary identity, that of an at once monumental and ephemeral work which depends on a particular and unique connection with a given space, and which disappears once the time earmarked for his exhibition is up.

Thierry Davila